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The Suspicious Qatari Role in Post-US Afghanistan
However, the project of reviving and strengthening political Islam in the Middle East and the entire Islamic world is not the task of Qatar alone, but Turkey and Iran are also involved in this very detrimental cancerous scheme. Therefore, every defeat inflicted on the groups of political Islam in the region is considered a loss for Qatar, Turkey, and Iran, and vice versa.
On this basis, when the Muslim Brotherhood lost in Egypt in 2013, Qatar doubled its efforts to support other Muslim Brotherhood groups in Tunisia and Libya. In addition, Qatar has become a hotbed for the Muslim Brotherhood involved in terrorism cases and fugitives from judicial decisions, especially from Egypt.
The Qatari Al-Jazeera channel has also become a fierce defender of the Muslim Brotherhood and its official spokesperson. Qatar has also financed extremist Islamist groups in Syria, such as ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, as indicated by dozens of local and international reports. In recent years, it has also begun to support and finance extremists in EU countries, in cooperation with Erdogan's Turkey.
It is not coincidence that Qatar hosted the negotiations that lasted for years between America and the Afghan Taliban movement, which led to the disgraceful American withdrawal from Afghanistan. Qatar's goal behind those negotiations was to compensate different political Islam groups for part of the losses they incurred in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Tunisia. The very small emirate and very rich in gas hosts the largest US base in the Middle East and is also considered a friend of the Taliban movement, as it hosted the movement's leaders as refugees for years.
What Qatar has done as a broker between US and Taliban goes beyond the limits and dimensions of mediation to reach malicious political agendas. The primary goal is to achieve a ground and moral victory for political Islam in Afghanistan in particular, and the Arab and Islamic world in general. Especially, after the political Islam groups supported by Qatar and Turkey received painful blows and heavy losses in more than one country.
Secondly, transforming Afghanistan into a base that attracts all movements and activists of political Islam in the Islamic world with false identities and under flimsy pretexts, as Afghanistan is deemed a fertile ground for such polarisation. Thus, an additional dose of revitalisation has been given to the political Islam movements in the region and the world, which were living in ruins before the Taliban took power in Kabul. In this context, many international reports indicate that Al-Qaeda and ISIS will re-emerge in Afghanistan, stronger than before.
Turkey, also, wants to play a military role in post-US Afghanistan through the gateway to operating and guarding Kabul Airport. Knowing that Turkey has been active in this country for years in terms of intelligence, with the efforts of its ally Qatar. Likewise, Iran prefers the neighbouring countries, such as Afghanistan, be without an American military presence. Especially since the Taliban represents Sunni political Islam, which agrees with the Shiite political Islam led by Iran more than it disagrees with it. The common denominator between Qatar, Turkey, and Iran, in this respect, is the hostility to the Arab Trinity represented in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.
However, Qatar cannot do all this in Afghanistan without the knowledge, planning and prior approval of US. Indeed, it can be said that Qatar is implementing the American agendas regarding this issue. Since the first day of the Taliban's defeat in 2001, Washington instructed Qatar to receive and embrace the leadership and activists of the Taliban on its soil with the aim of containment in the future. In 2013, Qatar agreed to give the Taliban an official representative office in Doha, at Washington's request, to begin negotiations that led to the ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan.
It is not only money that empowers Qatar, a small emirate with a population of only 300,000 and more than two million expatriates, to play this systematic subversive role in the region. But, also, the complex and intertwined US-Turkish-Iranian authorisation, each in a different direction and in a dissimilar context.
by: Jwan Dibo
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